Make no mistake, the Knicks had no business being in this game. Not while losing both the shooting (.542/.611 slash for the Wizards, .418/.267 for the Knicks) and rebounding (41-35) battles by uncomfortably comfortable margins.

Jesse D. Garrabrant/Getty Images

Still, the contest miraculously stood right in New York's hands.

Knicks guard Beno Udrih split a pair of free throws to give the Knicks a 101-100 lead with 24.5 seconds left in regulation.

A one-point lead with that much time remaining is far from a guaranteed victory. But that wasn't the only thing in New York's arsenal.

The Knicks had a foul to give and the perfect chance to give it when Wizards guard Bradley Beal drove to the basket on the ensuing possession. But Udrih didn't use the foul, instead relying on defensive help that never came since, well, this is the Knicks defense.

"Beno opened the flood gates," Knicks coach Mike Woodson said, via NBC Sports' Brett Pollakoff. "It happened so fast. He was thinking the help was there and it wasn’t there. So he couldn’t even reach to grab the guy, to take the foul. But that’s where the breakdown occurred."

That's almost correct. Really, that was just where the first breakdown happened.

The Knicks defense parted quicker than the Red Sea, and Beal found such an easy look at the go-ahead shot, even he couldn't believe his eyes.

"They wanted me to run a pick-and-roll with [Marcin] Gortat, so my first instinct was to reject the screen and go baseline if I had it," Beal said, via NBA.com's Adam Zagoria. "There was absolutely nobody there."

No worries, though, since New York still had three timeouts to set up an attempted game-winner.

Only, no one called for even one of those timeouts. Not a timeout to advance to the ball; not a timeout to draw anything up to create a clean look at the basket.

Instead, Carmelo Anthony lumbered down the right sideline and fired off a contested three that predictably missed its mark.

Woodson put the late-game lapse on his shoulders.

"I probably should have taken for sure the timeout there at the end,” Woodson said, via Pollakoff. “Beno grabbed it and the ball was in Melo’s hands before I could even react, and I should have reacted a lot sooner once the ball went through the bucket."

This wasn't simply a plan gone awry. As ESPN New York's Ian O'Connor wrote, there wasn't even a plan in place: "In that previous huddle, Woodson never told his players to call timeout in the event of a Washington score, a fact Anthony confirmed."

Anthony didn't exactly pull his coach out from under the bus.

"If [Woodson] said it's his fault, then it's his fault," Anthony said, via Zagoria. "If he said it was his fault and he takes the blame, then he takes the blame."